Spell Interrupted

"He breathed the air outside the doors and it smelled like trains, diesel oil, and creosote ties under the steel track. He leaned against the depot wall then; he was sweating, and sounds were becoming outlines again, vague and hollow in his ears, and he knew he was going to become invisible right there. It was too late to ask for help, and he waited to die the way smoke dies, drifting in currents of air, twisting in thin swirls, fading until it exists no more."

- The narrator in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony, about her half-breed protagonist, Tayo, who was just returning from the South Pacific theater after WWII.

"It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had."

"Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves."

Snow blew in from the west today, slanted, copious, chaotic. I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko in the window of a Taos cafe and walking landscapes of baked red clay and dust storms. The sun in the story made me squint and the nausea of Tayo, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, became my nausea. I couldn't finish my chicken pot pie. It was dark in the cafe, 3pm feeling like dusk. Although crowded with people, there was a sense of isolation, of hollow halls, of purposeless beings. The music was too loud, stomping on my ride on a reluctant, felt gray, skinbones burro down and up arroyo after arroyo on the way to a bar on Route 66 to meet other vets from the pueblos. But it was elegiac, melancholy, the vocals in echoing circles, like starving buzzards left with only the company of other buzzards. Emptiness with cold, metal walls. Automatons moving errantly, programmed for crisscrossing and leg shaking. Lost on the planet and in the time of this book. Smelling it's beauty, burning flesh, sentences so true you have to dig trenches with them. I did not want to lift up my head. I did not want to see the motion in the room, or break the 4th wall and talk to the characters rooting around me. Tayo choked on grief, stuffed from the forced meal of it, and my eyes bulged and watered. I tilted my head left, two ladies in red playing scrabble on the big corner table, and I wondered if they saw the glistening in my eyes. Not a page went by when Silko did not spin out a line of gristle, and smooth muscle sheath. "Yes, yes," I'm thinking. But it's not a yes of goodness or pleasantness or satisfaction from reading, but of yes, I know this and there is no answer for it. Yes, I know this, and it makes me want to disappear like Tayo's smoke. And then Dave the CPA walks right through the wall and thrusts out his hand. "What, you don't say hello to your old friends?"
"You shaved off your goatee. I'm lost in this book, man. Haven't looked up in a while. Can't break from it."
"Alright, Mr. literature, I won't interrupt. But I want to talk to you about a lady on Santa Clara Pueblo who needs to sue an oil company for sucking out the oil under her property from outside the boundary line by hooking the drill horizontally right under her. She already won $1.8 million settlement from the other oil company that was doing that."
"I do only small business law and bankruptcy."
"Right. Come talk to me."
"OK, in a bit."

Now I had to look around, stretch, make all of those moves you make when you think people are looking at you, when you're back in the world of contact and movement, of social acknowledgment. I looked out the window and saw my formerly muddy car turned into a box of furry whiteness. Fat flakes being driven south to north by a slamming wind. It took my eyes, and I realized everybody else was looking out the window. Snapped out of the story trance, my skeletal connection to the race grew some meat, and I joined in the weather-made delight. Taos is a place where people love the weather, the drama of it, the sweeping in of the cold front that augurs a return to active winter, to swirling fists of storms lined up from the Gulf of Alaska down to Southern California promising heavy snows to our Sangre de Cristos to augment the stagnant snowpack. Although we've had a flurry or two, the past month has been mild and sunny, only the early morning cold and retreating shield of snow to remind one of the ferocity and heavy chill of late November through early January. I had been thinking before falling into Silko that Taos, in the lower elevations and on out on the desert, was starting to look like the victim of a wreck who shows you her healing wounds too soon after the accident. Spoiled and mishapen shrubs, torn up mud, cloudy amber pools of melt, matted, stained hay grasses, and children's toys, broken and upended, emerging in front yards for the first time since November 28. Scarred with irrigation ditches, the fields flanking town looked like they'd gone under an unsteady knife. The snow had pulled back to the edges, in the trees, in the yards of houses along the outlines. It looked like a battle had taken place where the horses leaned down to search for magic shoots or old, dried grass with a speck of green left in it. That old end-of-autumn sadness hung out there, where the land is still soft but will soon be paralyzed and hardened and left on its own. The creamy, cold depths of winter, the early nights, the acceptance of dormancy, the dream of stillness in the covering of the landscape, the rounding of its features, all of this rolled back too soon and creating a no man's land, a desire to give up on the season and ask for the glories of the next, yet knowing that river cannot be forded, not today.

Silko and Tayo are with me, now in my house with huge windows slapped full of snow now frozen in a design that looks like dancing tulips and daisies. Once the spell was broken in the Cafe, I could not get it back. I gave up and went outside to revel. With the sticky, apple-smelling snow attaching to my eyelashes and goatee, I cleared my windows, and smelled again the winter I'd been missing these weeks. I got in and drove into the storm, windshield wipers on high. People in the other cars, when I could see them, had broad smiles and red-cheeked glows going. Out of the automaton world, and the knowing of emptiness, I propelled myself into the giant cookie of Taos being filled rapidly with sugar cream. I drove north into a funnel of snow and became the only car on the road as I curved southwest on the Mesa. Sliding down and up through the undulations of Tune Dr., near my house, I lost the car to the left, corrected in the direction of the slide, but still ended up in a full 360 that landed me in the mouth of a side road. No ditches or fences this time. Feeling my angels, I let out a whoop, backed a few feet into the road, and got back on Tune Dr. for another 100 yards and home.

From Divisadero yesterday evening. Shangri-la.